How Staying Small Helps New Directions Publish Great Books

James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions Press, with the playwright Tennessee Williams and the poet and philanthropist Ruth Walgreen Stephan, in 1969.Credit Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah / Getty

It’s sometimes said, nowadays, that lifetime employment is a thing of the past, that rising through the ranks in a company is over, that publishing is a doomed enterprise, that the novel is dead (was it ever really alive?), and that poetry is deader still. By this reckoning, Barbara Epler’s career should not exist. But for more than thirty years, Epler, the president and publisher of the storied experimental publishing house New Directions, has been advancing the vision of James Laughlin, the poet, skier, and heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune who founded the company when he was twenty-two and ran it, for a time, from his aunt’s barn in Norfolk, Connecticut. His inaugural publication, in 1936, was an anthology featuring the work of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Henry Miller, among others: far-out stuff, back then. In time, New Directions would go on to become the first U.S. publisher of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolaño, Anne Carson, W. G. Sebald, and László Krasznahorkai—a staggering list.

Today’s visitor to New Directions’ elegantly shabby offices, in Chelsea, may stand on the nineteenth-floor balcony beside Epler, who is in her fifties and has a big, throaty laugh, under a pair of carved stone lions silently roaring high above, downtown and the Hudson River spread out beneath, and be forgiven for thinking that he has somehow stepped into a lovely and improbable alternate universe.

Inside, there are small, quiet, old-fashioned offices, one per person. On the walls, there are treasures: the firm’s original colophon, the unmistakable work of Rockwell Kent; an original Alvin Lustig mechanical with tissue overlay for the jacket of “Nightwood”; notes written on the famous prescription pad of WILLIAM C. WILLIAMS, M. D.; a photograph of Laughlin, who died in 1997, in silhouette. Epler, who joined the company as an editorial assistant fresh out of college, in 1984, and went on to become editor-in-chief in 1996, publisher in 2008, and president in 2011, seemed to be giving not an office tour so much as a museum one, especially when she opened the door to a small room containing one copy of each of nearly all of the more than thirteen hundred books published here so far. Céline, Nabokov, Tranströmer and Bolaño, Williams and Neruda and Sartre and Brecht and so many others: Laughlin believed in keeping the good stuff in print (or reprint). Many are bound in Lustig’s iconic, modernist covers.

New Directions evolved as it did because its founder was as far-seeing in business as he was in matters of taste. Laughlin wasn’t looking to corner a market or to disrupt anything; his ambition was to create an institution that would last. In a reminiscence in his 2009 collection “Oranges and Peanuts for Sale,” the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger remarked, “Laughlin’s wealth let New Directions survive as a money-loser into the 1960s, until the moment when yesterday’s obscure gibberish became today’s course requirement…. It is an old-fashioned, patrician way of doing business—the long-term investment—applied to the most unlikely product, avant-garde literature.”

“He was supremely thrifty, deeply aware of money and value,” Epler told me. “He could get six cents out of a nickel.” She said that New Directions enjoyed some profitable years between 1936 and the nineteen-sixties, but “for many years he counted on his Aunt Leila to pay the printers’ bills,” until the paperback revolution created huge new markets, New Directions authors began entering the canon, and “Siddhartha,” “A Coney Island of the Mind,” and others started bringing in real money. (Laughlin was also a terrific wag, and the originator, near as I can tell, of a popular celebrity-naming convention, referring as he does now and then in his correspondence and memoirs to his friend and mentor “EzPo,”—Ezra Pound.)

The size of the company, which is held in trust, is dictated by the terms of Laughlin’s will. There are, and will be, just nine employees, and the number of books the company may publish each year is also fixed. Profits are generally reinvested, and the relatively low salaries paid to staff are balanced out by policies like an annual bonus system—which alone might make up ten or fifteen percent of a year’s earnings—and a retirement savings plan. These constraints were baked into New Directions’ business model in the interest of quality and longevity. “We’re expected to make our own way financially,” Epler told me. “The trust is just how he left it to make it safe, so we couldn’t be bought by a larger corporation.”

As intended, those constraints have factored deeply into the company’s acquisition strategy. Its employees leverage connections, taste, a worldly sensibility, a capacity for risk, and thrift in order to bring revenues to the company and fine new books to a global readership.

The best book that I read last year was a New Directions title, the novel “Beauty Is a Wound,” by the Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan. Despite its warm reception in Indonesia, getting the book to American readers was a difficult undertaking. Its author had no M.F.A., no New York agent, no stories in quarterlies or journals—no “proof of concept,” as they say in business circles.

Kurniawan came to Epler’s attention via Annie Tucker, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology, who went to Indonesia in 2011 to do dissertation research on the interpretation and treatment of autism in Java. Several friends, knowing of her interest in the country’s literature, recommended that she read his first novel, a blistering critique of Indonesia’s bloody past, lightly and variously veiled as a horror story, a farce, a romance, and a B-movie sex romp—but shot through, too, with a strangely touching, lighthearted compassion. (Gillian Terzis wrote about it in Page-Turner last October.) “I read it and I was, like, ‘Holy shit, this is crazy,’ ” Tucker told me. “This book has everything. It has history, it has the supernatural edge … I basically fell in love with it.”

An expat friend of Tucker’s who knew Kurniawan arranged for the two to meet at a book event, where the author agreed to read her translation of his first chapter. “He looked at it and he said, ‘Sure. Go for it, you have my blessing, but the one thing is, you have to finish it.’ So I said, ‘O.K. I’ll do it.’ ”

Kurniawan told me that a couple of other translators had requested permission to translate “Beauty Is a Wound” before Tucker approached him, but she was the first one he felt had accurately captured his style. He grew up in a remote village with no bookstore or library, only a roving book exchange that offered a motley collection of graphic novels, horror stories, martial-arts tales, and romances; he came to “serious” fiction only later, as a university student in philosophy. “I went to the library and found a lot of books in English, the Modern Library—I found it beautiful. In the Modern Library, there is of course Russian literature and German, I read Hemingway, Faulkner, anything,” he said. “I read all of them, and one day I thought: I want to become a writer. I started to go to writers’ communities and they told me: there is high literature, and low literature. But all these books were all in my head already, part of my life, so I didn’t care about that; I just wanted to write, I just love this stuff, I love every kind of book, from Barbara Cartland to Dostoevsky.”

The “gleefully grotesque hyperbole,” as Tucker describes it, of “Beauty Is a Wound” required a publisher that was unafraid to depart from the more comfortable conventions of modern fiction, and to be ready to sell readers on a fresh kind of learnedness and insight.

Seeking to dedicate herself fully to the book, Tucker applied for a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant; one of the judges was Barbara Epler. After Tucker won the prize, a number of firms contacted her about publishing the eventual translation. “But when they found out that the book was, like, five hundred pages long, almost everybody balked,” Tucker said. “Barbara had the wherewithal to think about it.”

I asked Epler how she’d been able to pick Kurniawan out of a lineup, as it were, based on only a small portion of the book. “But that’s such a great opening,” she replied. “If you can’t see that and you’re a literary editor, you might as well shoot yourself. Or I mean, do something else.”

She thought for a minute and added, “One of the people I really admire on that [PEN] panel, who’s fantastic and makes these beautiful poetry books out of thin air with no money, said, ‘I agree, it’s a really good translation but you’re not going to publish that, are you? It’s so zany!’ and I said, ‘I like zany.’”

There are a lot of serious books with a zany side, but it takes a long time for them to rise up into the literary stratosphere, like “The Master and Margarita,” I suggested, until their bona fides are no longer in question. “There was one person in my office who is senior and she hated it, hated it,” Epler said. “I showed them the first chapter, and the following one—the Japanese occupation. She hated the change in register, and I said, ‘It’s on purpose.’… She tried to block it. But I promised that if it was a flop—I rarely make this kind of bet—I said I would give back half of my [annual] bonus, put it back into the pot. And she went for it—she said, ‘O.K., I’m going to hold you to it.’ ”

So you have crowing rights already, I said. The book made last year’s Notable list at the Times, and Kurniawan is now routinely spoken of as the heir of Indonesia’s most famous novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

Epler smiled and said, “It raised some eyebrows in the office.”

When New Directions decides to pursue a book, it moves quickly, in part because it’s a small firm offering advances that are usually in the low-four-figure range. The editors must be confident in their sensibility; they take risks on unknown poets and authors, and take them fast. The upside for authors is that royalties are paid on an escalating scale, so when a book succeeds, they stand to make more money; sometimes a great deal more, as for example in the case of the late, globally celebrated W. G. Sebald. Relatively unknown writers like Kurniawan benefit most of all, perhaps, from the intangible assets New Directions provides them: instantaneous status—the heady position of being on a backlist with Nabokov and Borges, and contemporary authors like César Aira and László Krasznahorkai, who were finalists last year for the Man Booker International Prize—and expert institutional support. Epler described for me a conversation she’d had with a foreign author who had received a substantially larger offer from another publisher. At a big house, though, there’s a risk that a new book can get lost in the shuffle, and so she told the author, “This is a big offer from New Directions, by our standards. We are offering to make your book an A title, we’re going to do everything for this book, and I can totally guarantee you that we will get lots of reviews, because I will chew on people until they review it. I’ll just personally chew on people.”

This level of hustle extends to other parts of the business, too. When Epler became publisher, in 2008, with the economy in recession, she immediately sought help in imposing financial discipline, asking Laurie Callahan, who had been publicity director, to become executive vice-president, and promoting Declan Spring to vice-president; the three direct the company’s finances. Callahan has been working to ensure that New Directions set aside the funds—half a million dollars, so far—for a big bill that is coming due in a few years: the renewal of rights to publish Tennessee Williams’s books. “It’s going to be considerably more than that but now we are well on our way to having the money in hand,” Epler says. “We’ve been taking twenty thousand dollars every month out of the general account, so I don’t see it. Because, when I see it … I buy more books.”

Epler showed me a small volume by the Swiss modernist Robert Walser, “Looking at Pictures,” which New Directions co-published, in November, with the Christine Burgin Gallery. I admired the handsome little book, its cover printed with a photo of the author; inside were lovely, tiny tipped-in color reproductions of the paintings under discussion (including works by Brueghel, Watteau, and Cranach the Elder). “This is when I pluck at the counterpane of money worries,” she said, “because I’m thinking, ‘Wait … we printed on the case? I don’t remember discussing that!’”

I noticed the price of the book and experienced a sort of reverse sticker shock. “You can do tipped-in art and sell this at a profit for twenty-five dollars?!” I asked.

“It went to China … true confessions. Not something that we love to do, but it feels necessary with these books including art. Almost all of our regular books are printed in America.” She mentioned an earlier Walser title, “Microscripts.” “The unit cost on the original book, that was printed in New Hampshire, was over ten dollars, and when we reprinted it in China, it was under four dollars.”

The relationship between art and profits is often a vexed one; for all the attention, the honorary degrees, the accolades, and the prizes received by the world’s most respected writers, for example, they are very rarely highly paid. And in comparison with their biggest-selling and most famous colleagues—J. K. Rowling, for example, or George R. R. Martin—literary authors are an esoteric commodity, appreciated by only a very few; this creates a certain sense of triviality around their profession, in the world beyond.

“It’s like the poodle show,” Epler agreed. “But what’s going to last? It’s going to be books like Eka’s, or László’s, or Sebald’s. That’s what people are going to remember; that’s what’s going to write the history.”